Mouthquake

by Daniel Allen Cox

  Isn’t anyone looking for you?

  Probably the same people who are looking for you, kid. Nobody right now. Enjoy it. I gotta go. It’s been real, real nice chatting with you. It’s just…it’s just that…

  And he was gone. I was alone with the stalactites.

  I could feel that he had come to deliver a message to me. But what exactly? As the Armageddon clouds begin to dissipate, I wondered…would I become an ex-Jehovah’s Witness like him when I grew up?

  Sometimes the students teased me when I brought my JW literature to school. I should’ve known better than that! High schools in Montreal’s West Island were the coolest in the city. You couldn’t simply read a Watchtower magazine in the cafeteria and expect to get away with it.

  In my high school, everyone always practiced their cement face. Indifferent to drama, they let it all bounce off an expressionless façade. It was the uninterested look they gave when a math teacher told off a student for not being top form on quadratic equations, or when a gym teacher explained Sex Ed through overly vigorous pushups. It was a fascist neutrality.

  The students practiced cement face on each other too. If someone said something shocking—like the reason they smelled is because they had just finished fucking a fellow tenth grader to Nirvana’s Nevermind, or equally as shocking, that they were still a virgin, or if they revealed that their parents were millionaires and several castes above the rest of us, or conversely, too poor to afford a grad photo—the surrounding faces gave nothing away. The trouble with cement face is that it could appear too disapproving or moody, which had social implications. The key was to open your eyes a little wider while giving the face. It required a muscular awareness that could only be attained by practicing in mirrors hung on the insides of locker doors. You just had to remember that everything was reversed in the mirror.

  Sometimes, students accidentally gave each other cement face in the mirror. Fellow practitioners of the art could easily recognize each other. We were as remote as the suburbs in which we lived. Nothing could impress us. We expressed no emotion while storms brewed inside.

  Kids in grades seven and eight often let their frustration slip through cracks in the face—a flared nostril, quivering lip, redness. They paid for this laziness by making themselves prey. The older kids feasted on the reactions of the young, grew full on their shock. There were so many things you could say to someone to make their mouth fall slightly open, to make them look away, bite their lip, frown. Sometimes the younger kids thought they were doing cement face. They stood still, but didn’t realize their cheeks were livid palettes of emotion, morphing as feelings raced through them and toppled each other. It was ugly but delicious. The grade ten vultures were trained to spot the mannerisms of the weak, the giveaways of the soon-to-be-dead.

  We had other problems. Acne interfered in a major way with social domination. The millionaires among us spent thousands on Oxy cleansers, Neutrogena, and other skin-clearing agents. The poor among us wiped their oily faces on their T-shirts. We all did something to get rid of the zits and blackheads that marred our otherwise perfectly bland faces.

  I had fantasized about having a cement face, but stuttering made that impossible. I clenched my teeth and contorted my lips through every other sentence, as if my face were the surface of a massage chair and my words the rotors just underneath that warped the surface. Time froze when I did that, and everyone looked. Some kids made fun of me for bloodsport, but others admired me for having the nerve to show my storms. At first, I was confused and wondered how they could think I would stutter on purpose. They reminded me that I chose to speak. In our high school, I had the option of not saying anything at all. You could coast wordlessly through five years, and nobody would know. My choice impressed some people. But I still wasn’t invited to cement-face parties, which were basically students milling around looking at each other’s teenage stone, masquerade balls of kids disguised in the thinnest of antibacterial wipes. What was everyone so afraid of? We were all assholes.

  The most visible thing on my face at all times, however, was desire. Sex had started to spring in me like a slow leak, one that didn’t release any of the pressure. Gym class appeared to be an intricately designed form of torture for young queers. The definition of wrestling appeared to be a guy straddling your head so that when you tried to catch your breath, your nostrils vacuumed up his nuts, and his scent defeated you. I’d run home to beat off to Vanilla Ice, stretched out on the bed with my undies around my ankles and headphones clasped on my head like the big, warm hands of a hung teen wrestler making me submit.

  Music always turned me on—that was a given. But it gave me subtler messages, too. For example, that there were shadows in my past connected to music, and possibly even to particular songs. I would have to turn my life into a playlist and listen for the minor keys, the mistakes. I would have to transform the darkness into sex so I could understand it on the physical plane, because sex was something I wanted to make more knowable to myself.

  I suppose it was a coincidence that when I went to the HMV music store and squatted at a listening booth, ready for a few hours of discovery, “Beat It” was the next cued song. But that would surely be jumping ahead—I decided to start my search with songs beginning with the letter A. Cue the start of a long and boring future.

  Most of the music sucked. That’s probably why I started a band. My real friends were good to me. Outcasts never admit to their shared failures, they just cling to each other. For whatever reason, we hopped a bus at Fairview mall one day and went downtown to Steve’s Music. We spent the rest of our acne budget on amplifiers and guitars, electric and acoustic, steel and nylon strings. Maybe we’d need an egg shaker, so might as well pick one up, and a Casio keyboard with pre-programming to make up for the years of music lessons we didn’t take, and maybe we could get that drum kit if they accepted us for the layaway program. Luckily, back then our parents wrote their PIN numbers on the backs of their debit cards. Easy theft. Loaded with our new gear, we couldn’t get on the Metro, the bus wouldn’t take us, and fucked if we were going to spring for a taxi van, since the surcharge was a rip-off. Hitchhiking from downtown back to the West Island with our swag made us feel like a real band. I suppose that, technically, it was the first and last time we were ever on tour.

  With the help of a few chord charts, and after stealing licks—if not note-for-note then at least in spirit and posturing—from the Cure, the Smiths, Pink Floyd, the Tragically Hip, the Cult, and Depeche Mode, we started to entertain each other in a basement studio deep in the West Island bedrock. I’m pretty sure that the harder and louder we flailed, and the more electricity we wasted, blasting our inexperience and lack of musical prowess to nobody, deaf to each other’s atonal meanderings and timing mistakes, the deeper we sank into the rock. We expected record executives to hear us through the stone and come knocking with a record deal.

  Our careers took a turn during one of those sessions. The drummer missed his last cymbal crash by at least half a foot. Time for a break. We made sure there was a towel under the basement door. The windows were open and the driveway was empty. We smoked a spliff and talked about making an album, getting on university radio stations like Montreal’s very own CKUT, and maybe even into the pages of Chart Magazine, Canada’s alternative music monthly. Pretty sure we could knock Treble Charger and Sloan to the back pages. Our guitar virtuoso skipped his toke to lay something heavy on me, something that would forever pit us against each other, and unfortunately, completely alter the history of unheard pop music.

  You should be our singer.

  Um, you’re joking. We don’t even have a mic.

  Yeah, we do, we just never took it out of the box. It’s over there.

  Uh…why me?

  Because it makes sense. You’ve been writing lyrics.

  How do you know?

  It doesn’t matter.

  It matters. And they’re not really lyrics. They’re more like poems. They have nothing to do with our so
ngs.

  We can make them fit. That’s how bands do it. Everyone knows that Cobain wrote “Something in the Way” as a suicide note, and when Nirvana just happened to find it, he pretended it was for one of the songs. You can tell when he sings the part about fish not having any feelings. Nothing fits. Get it? That’s it. Anyways, you have nice hair.

  And singing is about having nice hair?

  Someone has to get the rest of us laid. It doesn’t really matter who. But we do need someone.

  I suppose I could give it a try.

  If you were planning to do anything to yourself, like bad stuff, you’d tell us, right? Some of your lyrics are kind of…

  Stop going through my fucking stuff. The weed is making you paranoid.

  In our haste to make the cover of Chart Magazine, we forgot to buy a mic stand, so we ended up crazy-gluing the mic to the top of a tall blue bong we placed on a table. We got the microphone to work, somewhat, despite bad feedback. I stepped up with a sheet of looseleaf in hand, suddenly relieved of my keyboard responsibilities. I opened my mouth and sang.

  It was the first time I could ever remember not stuttering for entire minutes at a time. It was weird to be so unbroken. I should’ve been happy. Really happy. But I could see my reflection in the blue bong glass, and soon sank into a musical depression that, as it turns out, was perfect for the song. Because what I saw was cement face. I was giving it. And it was terrible, because I suddenly didn’t belong with my friends. Wearing this new face, I belonged with the strangers at school whom I could never know, and who could never know me. I vowed never to sing again.

  That was the beginning of the end of the greatest band never to come out of the West Island. We became an instrumental group. I started to write lyrics in French, and kept them to myself:

  Dieu le roi

  L’ange de nos ruelles froides

  Embrasse-nous, écrase-nous

  Tes enfants fidèles

  Tes enfants grands et curieux

  Explique-nous la guerre

  Explique-nous les cris d’animaux si forts

  Si forts partout

  Champion du monde

  Sacré coeur, coeur géant

  Antonio de Rosemont

  Force des forces

  Ange des trottoirs, Dieu le roi

  ERIC

  CRIES AND WHISPERS

  It was my summer of New Order. I went through their entire catalogue, not just the greatest hits collection Substance or even the extensive John Peel Sessions, but rather, all the albums and singles and imports and rare pressings. I wanted to hold time inside me in some way, to collect it and feel its movement, its passage through my body.

  Mostly, I wanted something impossible. I wanted to feel the exact moment that Joy Division became New Order. I knew in my heart that the death of Ian Curtis wasn’t the only dividing line, that in electronic music there was more grey than black and white. So I dissected the discography into thousands of little pieces in my head, trying to detect the changes in tone, in melody, in meaning. I was pretty sure I had stumbled upon something significant when I learned that the song “Mesh” was mislabelled “Cries and Whispers” on most releases of Substance, while the song “Cries and Whispers” was nowhere on the record. On cassette versions, the song “Cries and Whispers” appeared, but it was mislabelled “Mesh.” What was the true relationship of these two tracks? What was the hidden intention behind these calculated flubs? It sent my brain spinning into conspiracies that explained the 1990s as they had so far unravelled, and held predictions for the end of the decade. All I knew is that one thing unlocked the other, and vice versa, and if I could study the pattern, the teeth on the keys in the lock, then I could learn to apply the model to the aspects of my life that needed locksmithing.

  What I couldn’t process or handle was the news that some releases had the song “Mesh” labelled “Mesh (Cries and Whispers).” It was clear that someone was deliberately trying to fuck with me.

  I spent time working these details out and drinking myself silly at loft parties in Griffintown, where everyone had a 3,000-square-foot space with sixteen-foot ceilings, and the rent was something like $500, but nobody knew exactly who lived there or how to pay the landlord because there was a good chance that the building was abandoned and the tenants were squatters. There were always ecstasy pills between the sofa cushions, and crabs and scabies. But at least there was ecstasy. When the cops came to kick us out at three a.m. because some asshole neighbour complained about the noise, we’d stumble over to Stornoway Gallery to see if the painters had any drugs, and since they had taken them all, we just made out with them, hoping to get stoned on their saliva.

  Eric and I met at one of these parties, held in a loft. It was a rave, but nobody called it that. What a strange American word for a bunch of Montreal fleabags like us who got together to split our drugs and drink for as cheaply as possible away from home. I didn’t see anything marketable in our nighttime activities, but a rave it was, and it was catching. The night we met, I had downed a six-pack of Dow beer from Quatres Frères and puffed through half a pack of Peter Stuyvesants. I stopped to pick up an extra pack before the party. The loft was full of the usual neighbourhood freaks, including some boys who had fucked me, but thankfully they were too wasted to recognize me, and I could dance in peace. Pet Shop Boys and Violent Femmes, I think. Then someone jammed two fingers into my nostrils and mainlined me with Vicks VapoRub. My nasal passages exploded with eucalyptus and cherry mint, and my lungs opened up wide, giving me an oxygen rush. Then I saw the boy attached to the fingers, but before I could say anything, he stuffed a Ring Pop candy pacifier into my mouth, lime flavour. We danced on a compound sugar high until morning. I yelled at him above the music, and he just nodded at whatever I said. I was so attracted to how close he stood to the rack of subwoofers, so fearless. We made out for hours, a sloppy mess of cisgender privilege.

  After a while he said he had to go, leaving me confused and with a boner. We didn’t have a pen, so I made him scratch his number into the foil wrapper on my pack of smokes. Then some real good shit came on, I think it was Duran Duran. I couldn’t stop my body from moving, but I was terrified of accidentally flattening his number out of the foil. Still, I said fuck it and danced as hard as the music made me.

  The next day, I could hardly make out the number, but there it was. I took a chance and called him. Whoever answered hung up. I tried again and got more hang-ups. Morning-after remorse? I tried not to take it personally, and for me, that meant getting my drinking on early. Luckily, the dépanneur on the corner opened at ten a.m. on Sunday, which meant I could get a bottle of Baby Duck red wine in exchange for beer empties. You knew it was a good wine just by smelling the inside of the twist-off cap. It went particularly well with my classy Peter Stuyvesants.

  Home was on rue Prince Arthur, a seven-room flophouse on top of a Portuguese restaurant, a hundred bucks a month, but nobody had the money. Nobody could remember ever seeing the lease. We lived in the luxury of our opulent squalor. Each roommate had their own radically different aesthetic, so we violently co-existed side-by-side in the two-floor museum of clashing styles, from the baroque student-poverty look, to dilapidated IKEA showroom, to Trainspotting smackhouse grey, to classic Persian in felted red and gold gilt. Each of our private spaces was a vomiting of our ideals. For people sharing a house, we couldn’t have been more different. My own look involved throwing everything out except for a giant oak desk with copper-riveted green leather trim and a chair placed at the other end of the room. I was going for the sparse Soho gallery look.

  There was a living room in the house, but we suspected the furniture of harbouring a dormant army of scabies mites, so we avoided it. Instead, the kitchen became our communal space, with no decoration other than the two-year pile-up of unwashed glasses and dishes filled with cigarette ash. Some of that mess pre-dated us, so no one took responsibility.

  The kitchen was an anti-design zone. One day, when everyone was out, Jack had th
e brilliant idea to make fries, as if you couldn’t buy them from any number of places down the block. He started a grease fire, resulting in a ten-foot swath of charcoal soot on the ceiling. Jack was an artist looking for a gallery (weren’t we all), so before anyone came home to see the damage, he decided to decorate the singular black column with arabesque strokes of mascara, a fresco that supposedly told the story of humanity as smoke marching through the ages.

  We had no problem with the fire, but the art was hideous. We group-evicted him within the hour, everything straight from the second-floor window.

  The kitchen was where we sat and commiserated about our romantic failures, our near hook-ups. It was the room where there were always spare cigarettes on the table. We ate McCain Deep’n Delicious frozen chocolate cheesecake right out of the pan for all-nighter breakfast and planned the next night’s crash and burns. We were a crusty facsimile of the Golden Girls, promising to be there for each other the following morning, which was just a continuation of the previous night, with reheated coffee from recycled grounds brewed through the pantyhose of excommunicated roommates. We had no sense of time. The kitchen was the room where we talked about HIV and AIDS and seroconversion and what people were saying about the new drug cocktails. It was where we learned the vocabulary to describe friends who were disappearing, either literally or because stigma made them invisible. Maybe stigma killed them, too.

  Rumour had it that our place was an old headquarters of le Front de la libération du Québec. We could feel the FLQ history in our kitchen, the desperate drags and hauls taken late into the night, the anguish of revolution permanently staining the ceiling. We fantasized that our table was where they dreamed up the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte—and who knows who else? What a morbid honour.

  When I got home after the rave, one of my roommates, Ingenue, could tell that something was wrong. No one was really sure how Ingenue came to live there, they just showed up on the couch one day and handed me a hundred dollars. It was the first of the month. Ingenue may have been the only one to ever pay rent on time. This earned them a certain unshakeable mystique. Their look helped with that: press-on cow eyelashes about four inches long, tube dress made of black electrical tape, and Air Jordans that they constantly pumped.